Did you have hair once?”
“Sure I had hair. Everyone has hair sometime.”
“Tell me something. This is very important, so you must tell me the truth. What color was your hair when you had hair?”
“I’m not sure, lady. It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten. It was just sort of hair-colored hair, I think.”
She straightened in a kind of triumphant posture, swaying a little on the stool, and looked at him with wide eyes. “You see? You are fortunate. You’re one of God’s fortunate children. God loved you and gave you hair-colored hair and then made you bald. Because when you have hair-colored hair or no hair at all, there is no question. The color’s the thing. If the color isn’t right, it’s very bad for you. You should thank God because He gave you hair-colored hair and made you bald.”
“Okay, lady. Thanks, God.”
She nodded and leaned forward again abruptly, halting the collapse of her body with her elbows on the bar. She liked this bartender. She had great faith in him because he was an It and because he was bald and had once had hair-colored hair.
“Now you must tell me the truth again,” she said. “Please don’t spare me because you have a kind heart. Look at me and tell me truthfully what color my hair is.”
“It’s brown, lady. Dark brown. Very pretty, too.”
She took hold of a lock and pulled it down across her forehead in front of her eyes and examined it closely. She said sadly, “You didn’t tell the truth. You lied to me. I’m sure you meant it kindly, and I thank you for being kind, but to tell me a lie was really the most unkind thing of all. Shall I tell you the color of my hair?”
“It looks brown to me.”
“It’s not. It’s nameless. It’s abominable. The nameless and abominable color of my hair.”
Again she was overwhelmed by self-pity. She let her head fall forward gently onto her forearms, and the silent tears gathered and fell down onto the bar. She was alone on a lip of rock above the empty cup of the world, and God thought it was funny and laughed, and there was really nothing to be done about it by anyone at all, not even a bald-headed It who meant to be kind.
The bartender thought wearily that this one was really the frosting on the cake. He’d seen a lot of wacky dames in his life, you met all kinds tending bar, but this one was worse than wacky. This one was meat for a psycho ward. Talking about God. Talking about the color of hair. Telling a guy he was lucky to have a head like an egg. He cursed softly and came around the bar to her side. He shook her gently.
“Look, lady. How about the coffee? The nice black coffee?”
She lifted her head and peered at him through tumbled hair of nameless color that looked brown. “Oh, yes. Fill up the cup with coffee. Fill up the empty cup of the world with hot black coffee.”
She slipped off the stool and sagged, and he supported her weight tiredly. “Easy, lady. Just take it easy. Just come along this way.”
He guided her back to the booth, and she sat down on the leather-covered seat and lay her head down on the table. He looked down at her and shook his head slowly from side to side and cursed again under his breath, wearily and bitterly and not without a certain compassion. Crazy-talking dame. Headed for a psycho ward, this one. Headed for the big break, God help her. There. She even had him thinking about God. He turned and went for the coffee.
She sat with her head on her arms and heard him move away, but she was not there in a real sense at all. Neither was she any longer on the lip of the world listening to the laughter of God. She was in the chair at the window above the roses, and she was listening to the harsh ringing of the telephone in the hall below.
The telephone rang in long, persistent bursts. She sat rigidly erect in the chair, thinking that she wouldn’t answer, but then, after the deliberate delay, she was up and running in darkness toward the door in a contrary fear that she would be too late to answer before the party at the other end hung up.
She took the call on the upstairs extension, and the party on the other end was a starched impersonal voice that asked if it was Miss Kathryn Galt speaking.
“Yes,” she said.
The starched voice identified itself as the General Hospital, as if it were an animated stack of stone and steel and mortar, and Kathy had a wild, random thought that if a hospital could really have talked, it would have talked with just such a voice. The voice said that Stella was an emergency case in the hospital. She had been brought in from the highway, where she had been involved in an accident. It would be advisable for Kathy to come at once.
She went. She left the phone uncradled and fled as she was down the stairs and outside, leaving open behind her the door through which Stella would not come again with one of her men, or her one man, neither tonight nor in a few days nor any time ever. The hospital was almost a mile across town, and she ran all the way, through light and darkness toward the terrible corollary to the answer to her prayer. In the hospital as she ran, without sound or portent or apparent consequence to earth, Stella died.
It was a long time before Kathy knew it. She sat in a cold white hall on the top floor of the hospital and waited. She sat on the edge of a straight chair with her torso and head held perfectly vertical and rigid from the hips and her knees and ankles together in the posture of a small, terrified girl trying valiantly to contain her terror. People in white went past her on rubber soles. Their feet made no noise, but their clothing whispered like brittle branches stirring in a winter’s wind. They didn’t look at her sitting there on the edge of the chair, didn’t seem to care that she had prayed to God to let a man die and that God had let the man die and would perhaps let Stella die, too. They didn’t care because they were meatless and soulless. You could tell by their soundless tread, their deathly pallor, their indifference to suffering and damnation.
She wondered why she couldn’t weep for release, but the bleak frigidity of the environment had permeated her flesh and frozen her blood, and so she sat mute and motionless. She tried to pray again, this time for life as she had prayed earlier for death, but she found that she couldn’t pray because she was now afraid of the whimsy of God. She could only sit rigidly and wait, and after a long time she was rewarded by the approach and owlish observation of a man in white. He was a man who was neither tall nor short, neither lean nor stout, an elusive mercurial impression of a man quite capable of presenting death without acquiring by association any color or permanence in her mind, so that she could never later remember what he looked like nor any material thing about him.
He introduced himself and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Miss Galt.”
She looked at him and said nothing, and he added, “Your aunt is dead.”
Aunt? she thought. Whoever is he talking about? Whatever is an aunt? An aunt is a mother’s sister. Or a father’s sister. I had a mother once, and my mother had a sister, and her name is Stella. Stella? Can this odd man be talking about Stella? If so, he’s a liar. He’s a cruel, malicious liar. Certainly Stella couldn’t die. And if she could, it would be in a cloud of fire ascending to heaven and not in this ugly sterility scented with ether.
She swayed on the edge of the chair, catching herself in a second and resuming her rigid posture. She said in a remote voice, “I must see her.”
He peered at her closely. “Do you think that would be wise? Perhaps after a sedative and some rest…”
